Its `Prize` Secure, Danville Takes A Tour Of Prison Reality

DANVILLE, ILL. — The swaggering and wisecracks about conjugal visits and suspect smoking materials faded to silence as the two prison buses loaded with citizen

``fish`` pulled within sight of the double 12-foot fences collared in razor-sharp gnarls of barbed wire.

The hushed volunteer prisoners could not see the 4-foot-deep concrete

``rat walls`` that prevent tunneling under the fences of the new $40 million Danville Correctional Center. But their eyes immediately went to the guard inside the nearest of five looming guard towers. The state sharpshooter looked down with a high-powered rifle across his chest, watching the housewives and legislators, businessmen and local muckety-mucks as they entered the belly of the beast.

The people of Danville wanted Illinois` 19th prison, and now they have it. When plans for the 926-bed, medium-security facility were announced in early 1982, about 20 Illinois communities began lobbying to get it. A few years earlier, most towns would have locked the city gates at the approach of any state official bearing plans for a prison under his arm. But 1982 was a recession year, and Illinois was a Rust Belt state growing gaunt around the waist. Unemployment in east central Vermilion County and Danville was running about 19 percent. Had the Russians rolled up to City Hall offering to hire 400 Danville denizens to make bombs within the city limits, Danville would have thought it over.

``While I was fighting to get this prison, there were many times that I thought if Danville wasn`t in such bad shape, I might be fighting to keep it out,`` said Sybil Mervis, a community activist.

Instead, Mervis and others in Danville supported an economic development corporation that lured the prison to a town that had been plagued by the departure of automotive and aluminum-related industries. When the victory was announced in the fall of 1982, then-Mayor David Palmer said that for the first time in a long time, his town felt like a winner.

Palmer died a few months ago, but next week his 32-year-old son, Greg, will start work in the prison`s state-of-the-art power station--which burns Illinois coal. ``My father worked real hard to get this, and my birthday is the day I start working,`` Greg Palmer said. ``It`s only a coincidence, but it`s a real present to me.``

Palmer, his mother and his wife were among about 80 Danville residents, news reporters and state corrections officials who were sentenced to spend the night in the prison Friday. Most of the visitors donned bright yellow prison jump suits and checked into private cells. Although they were locked in, given a prison meal and occasionally barked at by corrections officers, the one-night visitors were well aware that this was only a very light taste of life inside what convict-author Jack Henry Abbott called ``the belly of the beast.``

For most, it was close enough. ``I`ve never been locked in jail before,`` said Morris Hunter, a retired Danville firefighter. ``It is a different kind of sound when that door shuts behind you. That sound alone would deter me from doing anything that might put me in jail.``

The volunteer prisoners assembled at Danville Community College at midafternoon Friday and were strip-searched of their naivete by Warden Michael Neal and Illinois Department of Corrections Director Michael P. Lane.

``We will allow each of you to experience as closely as possible a life parallel to that of an inmate in our system,`` said Neal. ``We surely do not expect to deal with any problems from any of you.``

Even at that point, the laughter had a nervous edge.

The men and women were paired off, formed in a line and marched out to Department of Corrections buses with no-nonsense steel mesh screens separating the guards from the ``convicts.`` There was no failure to communicate. ``No talking. Sit where you are told to sit,`` commanded the guards. At this point, wisecracks were met with the sort of stare that might mean 30 days` solitary confinement when the prison opens next week.

Aboard the bus, the citizen ``convicts`` were counted. By the end of the exercise Saturday morning, they had been counted so many times most felt there were numbers tattooed on their foreheads. There were other subtle signs of imprisonment: the figure of a guard passing the narrow-slit window in the cell door every 10 or 15 minutes and the presence of electronic voices during time alone, during meals and always when prisoners gathered together. The less subtle forms were exhibited in mock frisk searches and surprise disciplinary hearings. Warden Neal`s wife, Carla, who was one of the ``inmates,`` was the unsuspecting foil in one surprise hearing. For alleged insolence she was sentenced to ``handpick enough Irish potatoes to feed the Red Army.``